Campaign against online porn creates new jobs in China

The Chinese government’s campaign against online sexual content is creating new jobs for the educated, internet-savvy Chinese youth.

Pushed by authorities to remove obscene videos, even cartoons that are deemed too risqué, big internet companies are looking for people who could scour the net and act as evaluators of what could be allowed and what fails to make the mark. The move by companies follows an online pornography crackdown launched by the National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications.

“Chinese game producers and web portals have been ordered to remove “pornographic” — or what could more correctly be called sexually suggestive — content such as depictions of young women or female cartoons wearing sleeveless T-shirts, shorts or bikinis. Even physical contact between animated online game characters of different genders is now prohibited,” a report in the WantChinaTimes website, a news website of the Taiwan-based China Times News Group, which is blocked on the Mainland, said.

Following the strict new rules, internet companies rapidly began looking for appraisers who could fit the requirements.

So far, at least 4,000 applicants have sent in their applications, the report said, adding that as many as 100 have already been selected. “A dozen major internet companies including Baidu, Tencent and Kingsoft opened positions for sexual content appraiser in mid April, which received overwhelming response on the internet and over 4,000 applications,” the report said. It added that job is open to both men and women aged between 20 and 35. The location is Beijing and the annual salary would be around $32,000.

“The job is to quickly identify content on the internet that falls foul of obscenity regulations,” the report added. According to the official news agency, Xinhua, China has shut down 110 websites as part of the national crackdown. Some 3,300 accounts on China-based social networking services, such as WeChat and Sina Weibo, as well as online forums have been deleted in the recently launched “Cleaning the Web 2014” campaign, according to the office, it said, adding that nearly 7,000 advertisements and 200,000 texts with pornographic content were also deleted. Some critics have, however, said that the crackdown was part of a broader attempt by the government to control online content and monitor critical content on the web.